To my horror, Oliver got the kind of thoughtful look you never want your boyfriend to get over your dad’s dick. “Had? What’s happened to it since?”

“I don’t know, but I like to think either the drugs shrivelled it up or it got squeezed into nothing by a groupie’s vagina.”

“Mum,” I loud-muttered, like she was hugging me in front of my school friends.

“Awww, mon cher. I’m sorry I embarrassed you.” She patted my cheek. Embarrassingly. And then turned to the boy she was embarrassing me in front of. “You’d better come in, Oliver.”

I trailed after them into the hall, which was about the right size for Mum, slightly too small for Mum and me, and far too small for Mum, me, Oliver, and the four spaniels who bolted through from the front room and started nosing eagerly at him as the newest object in the building. He did that thing that people who are good with dogs do where they crouch down and the dogs squirm all over them, tails wagging and ears flopping, and it’s adorable and domestic and bleurgh. And Oliver was blatantly going to want a dog in the future, wasn’t he? Probably from a shelter. And it’d have, like, three legs, but he’d train it to catch Frisbees as well as a dog with four legs, and he’d be in the park with it, throwing Frisbees, and this really hot guy would come up to him and be, like, “Hey, nice dog, wanna fuck?” And he’d be like “Sure, because your mother’s never said the word ‘penis’ in front of me” and then they’d get a lovely semidetached in Cheltenham and Oliver would make French toast every morning and they’d walk the dog together, hand-in-hand, and have meaningful conversations about ethics and—

“Come on,” yelled Judy. “Stop dawdling in the hallway. I want to meet Luc’s new beau.”

We bundled into the front room, Oliver doing a better job of navigating spaniels than I did, or, indeed, had ever done. “You must be Baroness Cholmondely-Pfaffle,” he said, with his usual effortless courtesy. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Pish-posh. Call me Judy. And I haven’t heard a damn thing about you because Luc doesn’t think it’s worth telling us things, do you, Luc?”

I slumped onto the sofa, as I’d been doing my entire life. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my fake boyfriend soon enough.”

“It’s your loss. I know all about having a fake boyfriend.”

“Do you?” I asked warily. “Do you really?”

Mum—who had only interacted with about three people since the dawn of the millennium—seemed to have decided “hospitality” meant “poking.” She poked Oliver towards me. “Sit down, Oliver. Sit down. Make yourself at home.”

“Oh yes,” Judy went on, “just after my coming-out in ’56, I spent three months pretending to be engaged to this lovely Russian fellow.”

Oliver lowered himself gingerly down beside me, and all the spaniels tried to get into his lap simultaneously. Honestly, couldn’t blame ’em.

“Charles, Camilla”—Judy snapped her fingers—“Michael of Kent. Down. Leave the poor fellow alone.”

Charles, Camilla, and Michael of Kent slunk abashedly to the floor, leaving Oliver with a single more manageable spaniel. A spaniel that currently had its forepaws on his shoulders and was licking his nose lovingly, while staring deeply into his eyes. If I’d tried to do that, he’d have told me he wanted it to mean something.

“He said…” If Judy let rampaging dogs get in the way of an anecdote, she’d had never have said anything “…it was very important that people believed he had a legitimate reason for staying in England and interacting with the aristocracy. You can keep Eugenie. She’s rather a love. Looking back on it, I think he might have been in the KGB.”

“The spaniel?” asked Oliver.

“Vladislav. They pulled him out of the Thames in the end, with a small-calibre bullet in his brain. Poor fellow. I say, you’re not working for the, well, I suppose it would be the FSB now, wouldn’t it?”

“No. But that’s what I’d say if I was in the FSB.”

“He’s not in the FSB,” I interrupted before Judy could get ideas in her head. “Or the KGB. Or the NKVD. Or SPECTRE. Or Hydra. He’s a barrister. And he’s nice. Now leave him alone.”

Mum, who had been flitting back and forth from the kitchen, stuck her head through the door. “We are just interested.”

“In whether he’s a spy?”

“In general. He’s a guest. Besides, you haven’t brought a boy home in a very long time.”

“And,” I grumbled, “I’m starting to remember why.”

Oliver made a placating gesture from behind Eugenie. “Really, it’s fine. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Oh now, doesn’t he have lovely manners,” announced Judy, as if Oliver wasn’t in the room. “I like him much more than that Miles. He had a sly look, like my third husband.”

“Miles?” Oliver tilted his head with gentle curiosity.

Fuck. I was about to have a horrible experience that could almost certainly have been avoided if I’d been more honest with the guy to begin with. It’s like there was a moral here or something.

Judy banged her fist against the arm of her chair, somewhat startling Michael of Kent. “He was a wrong’un from the start. Charming, of course, but I always knew he was going to—”

“Judy”—that was Mum, coming to my rescue, just like always…okay, like about 90 percent of the time, when she wasn’t the problem—“we are here to eat my special curry and watch the drag race. We are not here to talk about that man.”

“Then dish up, old girl. It must be ready by now.”

“My special curry, she cannot be rushed.”

“It’s been in the slow cooker since you got up this morning. If it was any less rushed, it’d be catatonic.”

My mum threw up her hands. “It is called a slow cooker. It is slow. If it was not slow, it would be called a fast cooker. Or maybe just a cooker.”

Oliver dislodged Eugenie and climbed to his feet. “Can I help at all?”

Mum and Judy gazed at him adoringly. God, he gave good parent. Worse, I was pretty sure he meant it.

“By the way,” I said. “I should have mentioned this earlier, but Oliver’s vegetarian.”

He gave me a genuinely betrayed look, as if I’d respected his ethical choices just to make him look bad in front of my mother. “Please don’t worry. It’s not a problem.”